There’s a particular flavour of betrayal that comes from a small black wristband telling you, at 11:47pm, that your “Sleep Performance” is “Compromised” while you are actively watching Germany in the World Cup versus Paraguay. It doesn’t say “compromised by what.” It doesn’t need to. It knows. I know. We both know it’s sport.
My WHOOP and I have entered what I can only describe as a structurally unsound relationship. It wants me in bed by 11.30pm with zero screens for ninety minutes beforehand. I want to watch an Argentinian scrum collapse in real time at 10 pm Spanish time, which by the time you’ve factored in the post-match interviews, the highlights package, and my own pathological inability to just go to sleep after a game Scotland are playing without Johnny Matthews; puts me somewhere around midnight, scrolling through rugby Twitter to see if anyone else also thinks the referee was compromised, which, ironically, is the one piece of analysis my WHOOP and I would agree on.
The thing about WHOOP is it doesn’t argue. It doesn’t even judge, not directly. It just produces a number. A red, sad, accusatory number. “Recovery: 31%.” As if I personally chose to have my recovery sabotaged by a man in Auckland deciding that New Zealand vs France should kick off at 9:10am local time, which is roughly the precise hour the laws of physics decree I should be either fully unconscious or, at the very least, not emotionally invested in a high-stakes maul.
This summer is a logistical crime scene. Wimbledon starts at lunchtime and somehow still finds a way to produce a final set that doesn’t conclude until gone 9pm. The World Cup is being played across three time zones I cannot keep straight, meaning some matches kick off at a perfectly reasonable 8pm and others apparently begin at an hour better suited to milking cows. The Nations Cup has decided, in its infinite Americas-and-Pacific wisdom, that fixtures in Denver and Santiago should air live in the UK at times that suggest the organisers have never once considered that anyone outside North and South America might want to watch. And then there’s the cricket, which doesn’t even pretend to respect bedtime — it simply continues, hour after hour, like a tide, indifferent to whether you are sleeping or not, because somewhere in the world it is always a reasonable time for cricket to be happening.
My WHOOP does not understand any of this. It has no module for “but it’s the World Rugby Nations Championship, Round One, and Tonga are playing Zimbabwe at a time that is genuinely only convenient for nobody.” It just sees screen time at 11pm and silently downgrades my strain score the way a disappointed parent downgrades their opinion of you without saying anything, just sighing in a specific way.
There have also, I’ll admit, been Conflicts. Not with the WHOOP; with the actual television schedule. Wimbledon and the cricket have already had a minor disagreement about which one gets the big screen, a disagreement settled, as these things always are, by whoever shouts “I’ve literally been waiting all year for this” the loudest. The World Cup and the Nations Championship have begun quietly circling each other like two boxers in the same weight class, both insisting they deserve the 8pm slot, neither willing to be relegated to the small screen in the kitchen where the WiFi randomly cuts out. I am not proud of how often I have now watched two matches simultaneously, sound on one, captions on the other, like some kind of deranged air traffic controller whose only cargo is sporting disappointment.
I have tried compromise. I told my WHOOP I would do “wind-down screens only” articles, no live sport; after 9:30pm. This lasted exactly one evening, undone the moment I discovered that “just checking the score” is, biologically speaking, indistinguishable from full emotional engagement, and my heart rate variability apparently agreed, recording the kind of spike usually reserved for actual physical danger rather than a 78th-minute penalty.
So here we are. My WHOOP wants optimisation. I want narrative tension at midnight involving a scrum-half or centre-forward I’ve never heard of from a country I couldn’t previously locate on a map. Recovery scores will continue to suffer. Sleep performance will remain, charitably, “developing.” But there is, I think, a kind of honesty in admitting that some forms of poor sleep hygiene are simply the cost of doing business as a fan, and no wearable device, however well-intentioned, is going to talk me out of watching the highlights one more time before bed.
